Seductive Drug Culture Flourishes on Internet

By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN

Even as parents, teachers and government officials urge
adolescents to say no to drugs, the Internet is burgeoning as an
alluring bazaar where anyone with a computer can find out how to
get high on LSD, eavesdrop on what it is like to snort heroin or
cocaine, check the going price for marijuana or copy the chemical
formula for methamphetamine, the stimulant better known as speed.

Teenagers need only retreat to their rooms, boot up the computer
and click on a cartoon bumblebee named Buzzy to be whisked on line,
through a graphic called Bong Canyon, to a mailorder house in Los
Angeles that promises the scoop on "legal highs," "growing
hallucinogens," "cannabis alchemy," "cooking with cannabis" and
other "trippy, phat, groovy things."

Or they can download advice on cultivating marijuana plants from
the Web page of HempBC, a store in Vancouver, British Columbia,
that offers "everything marijuana and hemprelated: bongs to
books, clothes to cosmetics and more," including an assortment of
hemp and marijuana seeds.

"Anybody can set up a Web site," said John Holmstrom, publisher of
High Times, a monthly magazine that has celebrated the marijuana
culture for more than two decades and created a site of its own on
the World Wide Web two years ago. "There are hundreds of
promarijuana sites out there. I can't keep track of them."

Alarms have rung in Congress and around the country about the risks
that online pornography pose to the young. But few such warnings
sound for what has become a virtual doityourself guide to drug
use, at a time when adolescents' experimenting is on the rise.

"We're really losing the war on the Internet," said Kellie Foster,
a spokeswoman for the Community AntiDrug Coalitions of America,
which hopes to establish its own Web site next month. "We've got to
get out there, and we're not."

The audience is certainly there. The Center for Media Education, a
Washington group that monitors quality on the Internet, reports
that nearly 5 million children from 2 to 17 years of age used
online services in 1996 and that more than 9 million college
students use the Internet regularly.

"We really are witnessing the development of the most powerful
medium that has ever existed, in terms of its ability to attract
and interest young people," said Jeff Chester, the center's
executive director.

The drug culture on the Internet has proliferated in several ways.
One is in the tolerance or outright endorsement of illegal drugs,
especially marijuana, in online forums and chat groups. Another is
in explicit instructions for growing, processing and consuming
drugs.

Critics like Gen. Barry McCaffrey, retired, director of the White
House Office of National Drug Control Policy, say they also detect
a campaign on the Internet to undercut the government's antidrug
policies by generating the appearance of rising grassroots
sentiment for modifying or scrapping drug laws.

"We say in a democracy that good ideas will drive out bad ones,"
McCaffrey said in a telephone interview. "So if the good ones
aren't there, we're left with the bad ones."

"The question," he said, "is not whether they have right to put
this kind of material out in the debate of ideas. The question is,
Do parents, teachers, coaches and ministers understand that this
information is out there?"

The indications are that they do not. Because they are less
computerliterate than their children, many adults have no clue
that their warnings against illegal drugs can be eclipsed by a few
keystrokes.

And, partly owing to freespeech protection, the Internet lacks a
quality control mechanism to separate fact from hyperbole or from
outright falsehood, even in discussion that may ultimately
encourage an activity that remains illegal, for Americans of all
ages.

Online testimonials make recreational drugs sound like fun.

Tripping out on LSD, a high school student reported, "was one of
the coolest things I've ever done."

A frequent snorter of cocaine said, "I always enjoy the first
toot," adding: "I can place a phone call and within an hour get it
delivered. It's as routine as coffee in the morning. And just about
as necessary."

There has even been a chat group for people "thinking of trying
heroin."

That kind of talk would be nothing new to a high school or college
bull session, but facetoface contact can help adolescents
evaluate a speaker's credibility. The anonymity of online
discussion, in contrast, tends to make even outlandish statements
seem credible to impressionable young eavesdroppers.

A connection among young people, drugs and the Internet was noticed
by Walter Shultz, the campus safety coordinator for a suburban
school district near Pittsburgh, who says he discovered numerous
online promotions of local "raves" allnight dance parties
where designer stimulants like "cat" and "specialK" were popular.

"There's no doubt in my mind that they have information on illegal
drugs and supply" through the Internet's links, Shultz said. "Some
of those take you into places where you wouldn't want a child to
go."

The online tolerance of drugs is in part a reflection of the nature
of Web discourse.

"The online world is the freest community in American life," Jon
Katz wrote in the April issue of Wired, a magazine that analyzes
the Internet. "Its members can do things considered unacceptable
elsewhere in our culture."

That includes challenging any assumption that drug use is wrong.

"I'd have to agree that the status quo folks are pretty much being
hammered," said Mark Greer, a director of the Media Awareness
Project, which uses the Internet to lobby for the weakening or
repeal of drug laws. "They don't seem to even be trying to compete
with us on the Web."

"There are a lot of people," Greer said, "who have just had it with
the prohibitionist mentality. This is an outlet where you can put
in your time and really make a difference."

Robert Curley, a freelance writer and consultant on Internet use,
estimates that threequarters of the online voices speaking about
drugs favor some kind of legalization.

"They definitely control the discussion on the Internet," Curley
said. "The prolegalization people are lightyears ahead of the
antilegalization people."

One group, the Drug Reform Coordination Network, has been working
on line since 1993 to change drug laws, although its founder, David
Borden, distances its campaign from unabashed proselytizing like
that of High Times.

"While we're friendly with them," Borden said, "we want to stay
away from anything seen as promoting the use of drugs."

In a report last March, the Center for Media Education accused
alcohol and tobacco companies of promoting their products on the
Internet with "captivating, fun, interactive sites that are very
appealing to underage youth." Other critics are saying the same
thing about Web sites that promote marijuana with a sassiness that
leaves sober arguments against drug use looking pallid.

David L. Rosenbloom, president of Join Together, a Boston
organization that helps community groups fight drug and alcohol
abuse, says marketers of marijuana seeds and drug paraphernalia are
copying the alcohol and tobacco companies, which promote their
products through glitzy Web sites that have featured croaking
Budweiser frogs and a Camel cigarette Party Zone.

"Sophisticated graphics make a difference," Rosenbloom said. "It's
more powerful than television and radio, because it is
interactive."

Holmstrom, of High Times, says the monthly number of electronic
visits to his magazine's Web site has doubled since last December.
Now, he said, "we are averaging 200,000 home page visitors a
month."

High Times dispenses an array of online advertising and other
services that Holstrom says have turned a profit, like coaching on
how to beat a drug test. The best of the tips are left to a related
telephone service, a call to which costs $1.95 a minute.

A survey that the magazine conducted among its Web site visitors
found that 85 percent were male, 43 percent were fulltime
students, and most were young. Holmstrom says 64 percent of
respondents identified themselves as being 18 to 24 years old, and
12 percent 25 to 29 years old. The number admitting to being under
18 was "not significant," he says.

High Times posts a disclaimer on its Web site that says users must
be 18 or older. But "we can't prevent underage people from
accessing the site without keeping everybody off," Holmstrom said.

One clue to adolescence on the Internet is the prevalence of
cartoons in praise of marijuana.

A High Times cartoon showed a character called PotPeye getting
stoned with his chums. "I'm mellow to the finish, 'cuz I smokes me
spinach," said PotPeye, who resembled the genuine Popeye.

A counterculture Web site called Paranoia had a cartoon pothead
declaring: "You know this stuff should be legal! It can make an
ordinary day so much brighter!"

The Internet also abounds in casual advice like the "suggestions
for firsttime users" of "ecstasy," a hallucinogenic stimulant that
has been found to damage the brains of monkeys in research at Johns
Hopkins University. Nicholas Saunders, the author of this online
advice, cautioned ecstasy neophytes only to "avoid alcohol and
other drugs, & if you are dancing, realize that you may be
dangerously overheated even without feeling uncomfortable."

Anecdotal misinformation appears particularly rife in online chat
groups. When a man asked whether it was safe to mix methamphetamine
with alcohol a dangerous combination, medical experts say a
seasoned user named Durto assured him, "Yeah, you can drink on
speed, and drink and drink."

Not all online drug information is prodrug. Join Together uses the
Internet to help isolated community groups around the country trade
experiences in fighting drug and alcohol abuse. Its Web site
downloads for subscribers more than 300,000 documents a month about
alcohol, tobacco and drugs.

"We're finding it a very powerful medium for disseminating
information much more rapidly and in a userfriendly way," said
Rosenbloom, Join Together's president.

Ethan A. Nadelmann, the director of the Lindesmith Center in New
York, which advocates a liberalizing of drug policies, said the
Internet allowed an unfettered discussion that government had
foreclosed in more structured public debate.

"The more the battle is played on this field, the more drug reform
policy advances," said Nadelmann, whose Web site gets 30,000 to
40,000 visits a month.

The battle is not always civil. In late March, Greer, one of the
opponents of the drug laws, posted instructions on the Internet for
jamming the tollfree number of the Community AntiDrug Coalitions
of America. The 5 calls he made in 10 minutes, Greer announced,
could be "quite devastating to Cadca if we can multiply my efforts
by a few thousand."

Ms. Foster, the Cadca spokeswoman, said her organization had been
forced to change its telephone format as a result.

"While we're trying to spend money preventing children from drug
use," she said, "these people are trying to spend our money so that
we can't do positive work."

In a subsequent interview, Greer said his "call to action" to
inflate Cadca's telephone bill had been "a kind of an experimental
type thing." His breadandbutter advocacy is a weekly Focus Alert
over the Internet that encourages campaigns of letterwriting to
newspapers, to try to shape their coverage of drug issues.

"I think that we've only just seen the tip of the iceberg on the
results that are going to promulgate from Internet activism," Greer
said. "You're at such a big advantage if you're trying to get truth
and accuracy out."

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company